Le Ravissement (The ravishment) is a video installation for three screens on the theme of amorous and warrior metaphors evoked by the deliciously ambiguous concept of “rapture.”

Être ravi, c'est être
capturé et enchanté à la fois (Roland
Barthes).

Collaborators:
- Mathieu Leblanc (video)
- Thierry Gauthier (audio)

Three simultaneous projections establish the parallels among certain forms of virtual and physical encounter. The centre screen presents scenes with ten actors who play the action of increasingly violent amorous rapture. The two other screens, to the right and left, show a man and a woman at their computers, visiting dating and social networking sites on the Web. The triptych is complemented by a sound track on which are voiceovers giving multiple definitions of “rapture” and reading excerpts from spam e-mails professing a desire to meet.

This installation results from a collective creative project, Le Festival de l'Eau, organized by the French association Les arts improvisés, which brought ten international artists who use mainly digital audio and visual technologies together in Burkina Faso in January 2000. The group of nomadic artists travelled by road and river to six small villages in the Mouhoun region. At each stop they installed an encampment, a generator, and all of the equipment necessary for giving concerts. They invited women, men, and children, musicians, dancers, and singers in the villages to participate.

My project resulting from this experience is organized in three chronicles – the dugout canoe, the villages, the concerts – each of which contains a series of photographs and a video. The arrangement and rendering of the images refers to the very essence of the encounter, to the contrast of high-tech and low-tech contexts. Although at the beginning the interest may have been ethnological, the document is infiltrated with meta-commentaries referring to the idea of the constructed, the fictional aspect of our perception of elsewhere.

Installation detail, Espace Vidéographe, Montréal,
march 2002

Nuit bleue Wall video projection, loop, 2:29 minutes. The descent of the river at night.

La descente
du MouhounSeries of 8 digital photographs / 40x60 to 75x100 cm+ Video, 8:55 minutes
The landscapes of the river and the bush become imaginary places where exotic animals that we have never seen before wander. Astonishment at being there to encounter them.